Trigger Warning: Proceed With Caution

Category Archives: Drugs

Last week was filled with anxiety and ED. I restricted every day mostly existing on black coffee and grapes. At night anything I ate got purged immediately. I am seeing a man who has 2 kids from 2 different women and things are not going well with one of the exes. All I could think about was running away the more we talked about the subject. On the weekend my kidneys started hurting. They are so fragile these days that at the first sign of infection, I am in trouble. When I saw the doctor on Monday she gave me a stern lecture. My body is so run down that every couple of weeks I am sick. She gave me antibiotics and told me to go straight to hospital at the first sign of it getting worse. It got worse, of course, and I decided not to go to hospital but to wait it out. I couldn’t face explaining the situation to my boyfriend, a doctor, a nurse, my work, my roommates. I just don’t care anymore. The last time I had a kidney infection I ended up on an IV.

I tried to eat better but ended up starving for 2 days and then purging instead. Tomorrow I have to go and have blood work to check my electrolytes. The anxiety I feel is debilitating. I can’t eat. I don’t sleep. When I do eat, it calms me momentarily and then I panic. I am in a situation where I cannot see any outcome other than heartache. I feel like I love a man who doesn’t have room for me in his life. I have this horrible sinking feeling that when it comes down to dealing with his psyhco ex-girlfriend/mother of one of the kids, he will make the wrong choice to keep her happy and I will have to walk away. I have a feeling that it is all going to explode this weekend. I wish I could be calm and look after myself, but I don’t know how.

Friday started like any other day and ended with me being rushed to emergency.

I woke up and groaned, clutching my head and stomach. I was in agonizing pain. Another post-purge hangover. Another pizza box on the floor; a visible reminder of my poor decisions the night before. I had starved so much and then snapped and binged in the middle of the night. I got up eventually, revived myself and went about the day as usual – work, coffee, restriction.

That evening my boyfriend and I went to a dinner party at his friends’ house. I drank nearly a whole bottle of wine with dinner which is not unusual for me. Somewhere towards the end of the meal, I started to feel unwell. The rest of the night is a blur and what I know of it in detail, has been relayed to me by my boyfriend. The friends started a fire outside for us to sit around and that is when he says I began to panic and be agitated. I went upstairs to purge dinner and quickly realized that I was in agony. My stomach hurt and even after purging, I felt like I couldn’t stop vomiting. I felt like I had been drugged. I lost track of time. I went upstairs and threw up twice more which I only told him about when he put me in the car after he realized that something was wrong with me.

He drove me to the hospital in the middle of the night. I cried hysterically and kept asking him to pull over so I could vomit. I crouched by the side of the truck sobbing, shaking, hyperventilating. He kept putting me back in the truck and eventually I started throwing up uncontrollably in a vehicle moving at 120 kms/hr. There was vomit everywhere: all over his truck, all over him, in my hair and smeared across my face and clothes. I was too far gone to care.

He tells me that when we got to emergency, I opened the door, stepped out and immediately collapsed face down on the ground. He checked my pulse which was faint and ran inside to get a nurse and a wheelchair. I came too when he picked me up and put me in the wheelchair. I don’t remember passing out. I continued crying hysterically as they wheeled me in. I was confused not knowing where I was or how I got there. I had lost track of time. He told me 4 hours had elapsed since the end of dinner and that was the last thing that I could remember clearly. Everything after dinner remained blurry and even now, I can only remember snippets of the evening.

They admitted me right away. The nurse took my medical history and I asked my boyfriend to leave the room so that I could tell her honestly about my eating disorder. I was too embarrassed to have him hear the disgusting details of my life. She reprimanded me and told me I was most likely severely dehydrated with an electrolyte imbalance. She made note of the starving, bingeing, purging (including vomiting blood) and laxative abuse. She sent the doctor in a while later and my boyfriend left the room as the doctor questioned me. He instinctively knew that if he stayed, I wouldn’t tell the doctor the truth when he asked about my medical history that they nurse had just taken.

The nurse began a barrage of vital checks (blood pressure too low; heart rate too high), urine samples (not pregnant), blood work (elevated liver enzymes consistent with drinking alcohol) and stomach x-rays (inconclusive ? gallbladder). They hooked me up to an IV and pumped me full of anti-nausea medication, re-hydration solution and an anti-anxiety drug. The entire time, my boyfriend didn’t leave my side through the small hours of the morning. He held my hand while I cried as they put needles in, covered me with warm blankets to stop the shaking and told me that I had to let him take care of me because he was not going anywhere. I was so distraught and was conscious of the fact that I didn’t want him to see me in this state.

After almost five hours, they discharged me from hospital and let him take me home, but not before another long lecture from the nurse about my ED. She told me I needed help and warned me of the danger I was in. She said that tonight could have been a close call if my boyfriend hadn’t had the presence of mind to rush me to the hospital. She reminded me that heart attacks from electrolyte imbalances are common in bulimics and many of the symptoms that they couldn’t diagnose they believed were complications from ED.

My boyfriend drove me home and it was almost 5am by the time we got there. He put me in the shower and washed vomit out of my hair, all the while holding me up because I could barely stand. Somehow, I knew without him saying, that he loved me. The next day I was weak and disoriented. He lay next to me and asked about my ED. My heart pounded as we had the conversation I hoped we never had to have. He asked about how much I was purging and what he could do to help me. I lay there feeling numb and overwhelmed. He told me he wanted me to be well because he was falling in love with me and wanted to grow old with me. The things about me that I thought would make him run didn’t. The man wrapped his arms around me instead and kissed me.

I got rushed to hospital last night about 36 hours after surgery. I had an allergic reaction to the pain killers I was given as they were contraindicated with thyroid drugs and the surgeon didn’t pick up on it.

By the time I got to triage, I was shaking uncontrollably and felt like I was having a heart attack. I was nauseous and dizzy and having trouble breathing. The nurse got me a bed right away because my heart rate had spiked. She asked me if I had been eating when I took my pills. I had been in so much pain because I couldn’t metabolize the medication and it made me so sick that I hadn’t eaten in almost 24 hours. “You have to eat,” she admonished me as I lay on a bed. It is hard to explain to a nurse that I just hadn’t felt like it. I have actually lost my appetite since the surgery. I don’t even think it was my eating disorder despite wanting to restrict because I am incapacitated.

After 5 hours they had stabilized my vitals, given me a different narcotic pain-killer and re-bandaged my incision after checking for infection. Today I felt weak and exhausted. I slept for hours and didn’t eat until dinner time. I think I am feeling depressed now about being unable to do anything or go anywhere. I am still worried about how unfit and out of shape I will be after 6 weeks of no physical activity. Tomorrow I will weigh myself, standing on one foot of course.

The surgery was done with a local anesthetic and no sedation. I am the kind of person that needs to be sedated heavily because I have such high anxiety. On the way to the hospital my heart rate started climbing and as I sat in the waiting room, I started shaking uncontrollably.

As soon as the surgeon came near me I started crying; ugly crying. He did my last foot surgery and I trust him implicitly, but for reasons I can’t explain, I just lost it. They same thing happened last time and it is embarrassing. For almost an hour I sobbed and shook and hyperventilated while the surgery took place. My dear friend who had driven me to hospital was allowed to stay in the room during the surgery and held my hand and tried to calm me down. I am so grateful to him for being with me. I apologized over and over to the surgeon and the nurses and my friend for my behaviour. The nurses tried very hard to get me to relax. My blood pressure sky rocketed and my heart rate hit 276bpms. I could not control myself.

When it was finally over, I was allowed to go home with a cast and crutches. Now the reality of having had foot surgery again has hit me: six weeks of no activity. No ballet or yoga or gym. I am terrified of how fat I will get so yesterday I ate as little as possible. I didn’t even have much appetite. It is hard to get around and do even the simplest tasks including going to the kitchen and making something to eat. I am hoping I will enjoy a restricting phase now. I am lying on the couch feeling a bit depressed and in a lot of pain. Luckily I have been blessed with good friends who are taking care of me.

The numbers tumble at first, falling rapidly, swirling past my stout calves, up along my tree-trunk thighs and settling on my broad, starving, ever-expanding stomach. The thrill of the numbers shrinking is a high no drugs could ever reproduce in me. I laugh from my double chins, my rolls shaking, heaving. I have done this before; I can do it again. I will do it a million times over if I must. The first few days are heady with delight and obsession like a new lover but an old love affair remembered. I am beside myself with starvation, with renewed determination to see the scale swing down to where my self-worth was last seen waiting for me. Perhaps my sanity will be there too?

After a few days they stop, stalling. A stalemate. We stare at each other; this is hostile territory. A new lover becomes an old enemy. Swords drawn at dawn after a night of purging, I step on the scale to weigh my loathing and self-hatred. The needle swings past numbers that I long for, that I dream of, that I want more than this life itself. They speed past – up, up, upwards to places, figures, sums that I know will eventually kill me with their truth. I would get on my knees and pray if it would help my quest for thin. Plateaus of pain, of discontent, of frustration and the foreshadowing of what will come. There will never be a consolation prize for fat.